The art of furniture design and construction has evolved rather rapidly over the last half century. A variety of shapes and sizes of furniture have been developed to provide comfort and decoration. Traditional furniture has been used to furnish homes, offices, and other commercial establishments for many years. Traditional furniture is typically made in a number of different styles, using a variety of materials, and finished with a variety of surface finishes. One feature of traditional furniture is that traditional furniture comes completely assembled from the furniture manufacturer, and once the item of furniture has been made it cannot be otherwise modified, sized, or tailored to suit the purchaser or the environment in which the furniture is to be used.
Alternatively, some modern furniture is sold as a kit with all of the furniture pieces and the purchaser must assemble the furniture using screws or other connecting mechanisms. Thus, the purchaser purchases an unfinished furniture kit that contains all of the necessary pieces to assemble a piece of furniture and then the purchaser assembles the furniture herself. These furniture kits seems to suit the mobility factor of certain segments of our society due to the fact that the furniture can be easily disassembled for compact storage and for moving and then readily reassembled in a new residence, office, or other environment. However, similar to the traditional furniture, the modern furniture pieces can only be assembled in one way to make a specific piece of furniture that is a predetermined size, shape, and color. The modern furniture kit comes with the exact number of pieces needed to build the furniture item. Thus, a purchaser cannot assemble the furniture kit in different ways or use different pieces to create different furniture items or furniture of different sizes, shapes, and colors.
There are a few known examples of modular furniture systems. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 2,582,553 to McMurtrie, which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, discloses sectional toy furniture designed for children's amusement and intellectual development. The toy furniture consists of toy building blocks formed by panels that are fixed to skeleton frames. The blocks are interconnected by rubber pins that fit into a pair of sockets positioned on diagonally opposite corners of the panels.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,811,728 to Redemske, which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, discloses plastic modular furniture formed with individual molded plastic base and storage modules having a plurality of grooves on the top surface. The modular furniture further includes a plurality of shells for sitting, sleeping, storage, and table tops having a peripheral ridge suitable for engaging the plurality of grooves on the base module. The base modules are connected together by a plurality of flexible clips that fit into a plurality of slots provided in each base module.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2006/0250052 to Davis et al., which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, discloses a modular storage system and a method of assembling the system. Each modular storage component includes a first end provided with an integral connector and a second end (opposite the first end) adapted to engage a second modular component at and engage with an integral connector of the second component.
U.S. Pat. No. 9,078,515 to Keragala (“Keragala”), which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, discloses an interior design unit for use in an interior design system, the interior design unit including a modular unit (or cell) comprising four, five, or six planar members, each planar member having a tetragonal shape and being removably attached to at least one other planar member. Additionally, each of the planar members includes a plurality of through holes for receiving a connector for attachment to at least one other interior design unit, and each through hole is positioned at a substantially equal distance from an adjacent corner of the planar member. In a preferred embodiment of Keragala, each planar member includes four through holes. The interior design system also includes a plurality of modular units and at least one connector for removably attaching one modular unit to one other modular unit.
Known modular furniture systems and furniture kits suffer from a number of disadvantages and drawbacks. For example, the modular furniture has generally been rather plain in design and appearance and incapable of providing a variety of choices such as choices in furniture designs, shapes, material selections, colors, and the like. Additionally, the prior art furniture kits are usually constructed to form traditional pieces of furniture once assembled, and do not allow for any degree of flexibility in assembly, shape, size, color, or the ability to be readily modified into other pieces of furniture for use in a house, an office, or other environments. Therefore, known modular furniture systems and furniture kits have little or no utility apart from their use in the primary combinations for which they are designed and intended.
In many modular furniture arrangements and kits of the prior art, assembly of the sections, pieces, or modules requires complex securing or fastening devices, and thus often requires special knowledge and skills for assembling the components. Alternatively, these systems and kits require numerous screws, nails, or other securing, fastening, or interconnecting mechanisms. Thus, these systems and kits take a long time to assemble because so many securing, fastening, or interconnecting mechanisms are needed and/or because the instructions for assembling these systems and kits include numerous steps and often complicated steps. Also, the various modules or elements are usually visibly connected to other modules or elements rather than presenting a finished appearance replicating furniture manufactured as a single unitary piece. On the other hand, if the interconnecting or fastening devices are sufficiently obscured to give the modular furniture or kit a solid, unitary appearance, the individual modules or pieces cannot be easily separated or disassembled or reconnected for alternative uses of the furniture.
Still another problem encountered with many known modular systems is that such systems typically receive extensive use, and often only a few pieces or components receive extensive use, which causes various elements of the system to become worn out or damaged, thus requiring expensive repair or replacement of large portions of the modular units. Particularly prone to such wear and tear is the upholstery, which receives direct contact and is more easily damaged than other portions and other materials.